


Misuse of Miracles

by sburbanite



Series: Divine Comedy, Hellish Angst [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Humor, M/M, POV Gabriel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-15 01:38:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19285462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sburbanite/pseuds/sburbanite
Summary: Gabriel gets receipts for all the miracles Aziraphale has been performing since the Apocalypse that wasn't...none of which are safe for work.





	Misuse of Miracles

Gabriel was incredibly pleased with his new treadmill. It was silver, had dozens of modes, and could be set to any incline up to and including Mount Everest. He'd had it imported from Earth, blissfully unaware that all home fitness equipment was the brainchild of a particular demon, who had wondered how much square footage of people's homes he could make them fill with huge machines that lowered their self esteem purely by existing. Nobody used home fitness equipment. Nobody.

Nobody except Gabriel, of course, who had used it religiously every day since he decided, for no particular reason, to avoid visiting Earth for a while. It had made jogging very difficult. The geography of Heaven, while holy, had only a tangential relationship with Euclidian geometry. Whatever your starting point, your chosen destination was always just around the corner. Planning a decent jogging route had made Gabriel's head hurt.

He was on mile 100 of his daily run, just starting to work up a sweat, when someone knocked hesitantly on his office door. The office was huge and white and echoing, like the rest of Heaven. It was meant to be peace and serenity incarnate. It also has a large sign on the outside of it stating that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES was Gabriel to be disturbed.

"Read the sign!" He shouted, still running.

The knock came again, somehow even more wretchedly timid. Gabriel let out an unangelic grunt and stabbed the off button on the treadmill. He stepped off once it had slowed down, and marched across the room.

"What!?" He snarled, wrenching the door open, "What could possibly be so important that an Archangel's orders mean nothing to you?"

A small angel was standing on the other side, quivering. He had a haunted look in his eyes, which seemed to stare straight through Gabriel as if he wasn't there.

"Well? Answer, then?"

The angel jumped, startled. He blinked a few times and cleared his throat.

"Uhm, it's Pravuil, sir, angel of records. We. Um. We've been having a bit of unusual activity on an active agent's account."

"So?"

"Very unusual, sir. I. I don't quite know what to make of it."

Pravuil had that far-off look in his eyes again. Gabriel wondered how the little angel would react to a good hard slap on the cheek. It was the kindest thing, after all, when someone was hysterical or not making sense or just being incredibly fucking annoying.

"Whatever it is, go and talk to THEM not me, understand? And do it literally anywhere else but here."

"That's the thing, sir," Pravuil said, looking at Gabriel imploringly, "I can't. The agent in question is down on Earth, and we've all been told not to go down there for some reason."

"Well, then, they shouldn't be down there either, should they? Recall them, or have someone else do it, I really couldn't care less."

Gabriel attempted to slam the door shut, but found that it wouldn't close. On the other side of it Pravuil screeched. Injuries were impossible in Heaven, but that didn't mean that having your foot crushed in a doorframe didn't hurt. Despite the pain, Pravuil didn't remove it.

"Sir, I REALLY think you should look at this and in fact I will not be going anywhere until you take this report from me, because I am at the end of my rope, sir, and whoever this Aziraphale is they have been making some truly EGREGIOUS use of their angelic powers. Uhm."

The angel's face fell as the realization dawned that he'd just yelled at an Archangel. Gabriel snatched the clipboard from him and growled. It was a strange, primal thing to see such rage on the face of an Archangel and Pravuil didn't stick around to see what his holy wrath would look like. He limped away as fast as he could and didn't look back.

Gabriel slammed the door shut properly this time, with a sound like a thunderclap. He was furious. Incandescent with rage. Really  _ fucking pissed off _ . He didn't need to look at the report to know that Aziraphale had been miracling his stupid little heart out, just doing whatever the he-  _ heaven _ he felt like. What was it, he wondered? A boatload of money? A round-the-world, all expenses paid vacation? A personal bloody trainer so he could finally lose that gut? Whatever it was, there was nothing he could do about it. If he cut the former Principality (for Gabriel believed him to be something else entirely at this point, something that could walk into Hellfire and smile about it) off from his heavenly powers, he might get it into his head to  _ come up there _ and find out why.

Gabriel seethed. Archangels are very much unused to being powerless.

He paced the length of his office, along the crystal window that looked out over all the wonders of the world. It took him a few trips back and forth to remember the report he still held in his hand. He was gripping the clipboard so firmly his knuckles had turned white. The report was neatly typed in point 8 font and highlighted in places with gold notation. Pravuil seemed to have picked out a lot of passages, particularly toward the back of it. Gabriel gritted his teeth and decided to find out what had made the angel so flustered.

It started out innocently enough. There were a lot of question-marks written next to frivolous miracles; 'improving the vintage of wine, parting the clouds so the sun would shine through, manipulation of musical choice on the part of several musicians." Nothing Gabriel probably wouldn't have done himself had he been forced to live down there with the squalling, sinning masses. For an angel with carte blanche to do as he wished it was all extremely banal.

Gabriel flipped forward to where the gold notation started to cascade down the margins. Things started to get a little more puzzling here: "magical removal and folding of clothing, banishment of dust and household debris, teleportation a few short feet within the same building". No real reason for that, surely? Had the angel become so slothful that he couldn't be bothered to simply walk upstairs? Aziraphale had always been lazy for a celestial being, but Gabriel was sure he'd never been  _ that _ lazy.

Finally, Gabriel reached the part where Pravuil's notes simply trailed off, a single blot of gold from his quill staining the page. "Summoning of lubricant oil," he read aloud, "banishment of...bodily fluids...painless insertion of…OH, GOOD GOD!"

Gabriel flung the clipboard away from him, sending it skittering across the smooth white expanse of the floor. For good measure, he smote it to its component atoms and distributed them to the furthest regions of the galaxy. Gabriel shuddered. He felt as though he'd never be able to get the images out of his head, no matter how many miles he jogged on his fancy treadmill. He wondered if washing his eyes out with holy water would help.

And with a Demon, of all things. How had the angel not  _ fallen _ for this, how was he still on  _ their _ books and not using up Hell's quota of supernatural events? As Gabriel saw it, he had two options:

The first was to consider that love knew no boundaries, that it could never be less than divine between two people who cared for each other so deeply. That an angel could truly love a demon and be loved in return, in every sense of the word: platonically, romantically, and physically. That Aziraphale loved more deeply and purely than the rest of the heavenly host combined and that God had seen fit to bless his union with the enemy completely. In short, Gabriel could choose to accept that he was dead wrong about everything he thought he knew about the nature of angels, demons, and love itself.

Option two was to pretend Aziraphale had never existed in the first place and purge all thoughts of him from his mind forever. Gabriel naturally chose option two.

With a flick of his wrist he opened a communication with Pravuil, whose ghostly image appeared floating before him.

"These records are to be destroyed, do you understand? Along with the records of the records and however many other layers of stupid little documentation you keep, got it? I don't ever want to hear about what Aziraphale has been up to again. Ever."

Pravuil twisted his hands together nervously.

"But sir, do I cancel his account?"

"Did I SAY to cancel it?"

"Uhm. No, sir."

"Then do as I  _ fucking _ say and just stop recording it. Nobody cares what that little shit gets up to, apparently, so he might as well get on with it."

"O-of course. Yes. I will  _ not _ record something. I can do that. It's only been 6000 years of continuous records, after all."

Gabriel frowned murderously. A muscle in Pravuil's eyebrow began to twitch.

"Shouldn't be a p-problem at all. Haha."

The image of the angel nodded and disappeared.

Gabriel tried to breathe deeply. He didn't need to, of course, but he'd heard it was helpful for calming truly apocalyptic levels of rage. He was surrounded by incompetents, pencil pushers and angels who insisted on inserting parts of their god-given anatomy into members of the enemy.

Slowly, he walked back over to his treadmill and climbed back on board. He would just keep running, and then eventually he'd stop fuming over the angel who was probably right at this minute using divine powers to make sex more romantic.

After 500 miles he was still thinking about it.

Eventually Gabriel managed to push it to the back of his mind, but he never used the treadmill again. Instead, it sat in the corner of his office and took up space judgmentally.

Down on Earth the demon Crowley somehow felt even more deliciously happy, and had no idea why.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a lovely tumblr post that I can't find now about the Archangels getting text alerts about Aziraphale's miracle-ing innocent things like marshmallows into his cooca.
> 
> I then realized a lot of fanfic has them miracle away post-sex messes...which would make for interesting updates for the Archangels.
> 
> On another note, I feel bad for poor Pravuil. He's a nice angel if a bit neurotic and he probably could do with a break.


End file.
